Nasa has found "a significant amount" of water in a crater near the moon's south pole, the agency said today in announcing the preliminary results of an experiment last month in which it slammed a rocket into the lunar surface.
Yes, we found water," said Anthony Colaprete, a project scientist for the so-called Lcross mission, during a televised news conference today at NASA's Ames Research Centre in Moffett Field, California.
"We found a significant amount," enough to fill about a dozen 2-gallon (7.6 litre) buckets, he said.
Lcross, which stands for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, crashed into the moon's surface October 9th.
The Northrop Grumman Corporation built the $79 million craft, comprised of a rocket and a followup probe, which plunged into a permanently darkened crater near the moon's south pole.
In last month's mission, the probe flew through a dust plume kicked up by the first impact, to observe the cloud's contents and transmit data to Earth.
Ice on the moon could supply future explorers with drinking water or air for breathing and rocket fuel, once broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The water could have come from a comet or from the solar wind, Greg Delory, a senior fellow at the Space Sciences Laboratory and Center for Integrative Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, said at the press conference.
Bloomberg